Women have fared better at employment than men in the five years since the
start of the recession, a report shows on Monday.

The number of women in employment since 2008 has increased by more than a quarter of a million, a 1.2pc net rise, while the number of men in work has dropped by 70,000, a 0.4pc net fall, a study of official labour market data has shown.

The analysis by The Jobs Economist, an employment consultancy which publishes the research today, claims the widespread assertion that women have been more adversely affected by austerity and job cuts than men is wrong.

Dr John Philpott, director of The Jobs Economist, said he can see no reason why the Government is focusing on trying to help get more women back to work when men appear to have been worst hit by job cuts.

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Mr Philpott said: "It’s widely asserted that the combination of prolonged economic stagnation and fiscal austerity is hitting women especially hard, with the recent report from the Government-sponsored Women’s Business Council highlighting the large number of UK women currently without jobs.

"Yet while we need to get more women into jobs and close the gender pay gap, the reality is that women have generally fared better than men in the labour market since the start of the recession and it’s therefore far from obvious that the problem of workless women deserves greater attention than that of workless men.”

He added: "We need to be identifying what help is appropriate for men and women in getting back to work, rather than just saying women are the problem."

Overall, there are currently 29.7m people in work; 15.9m men employed compared to 13.8m women, thelatest official statisticsshow. But the total figure of men in work has gone up by just 1.2pc over the past year, compared to 1.8pc for women.

Although female unemployment has risen more than male joblessness since the recession, Mr Philpott argues this is due to "job shortage" – supply being bigger than demand – rather than "job losses" affecting women adversely.

In contrast, men have been hit by job shortage and job losses. In the first two years of the recession, some 600,000 men lost their jobs compared to 100,000 women, he said.

The reason the female employment toll is so high could be due to the number of women starting their own businesses. Women account for almost two-thirds of the net increase in self employment since 2008, with the number of self-employed women having increased by a fifth, Mr Philpott said.

Overall, the number of women in self-employment stands at 1.3m, compared to 2.9m men.

"It's true that the cost of childcare may act as more of a barrier for women than men in going back to work, but many women are getting around that by starting their own businesses," he said.

Other jobs market assumptions Mr Philpott's report challenges include the number of older people affected by job cuts. The number of women aged 50 and over in work is almost half a million – 457,000 – higher than at the start of the recession five years ago. This is compared to the number of over-50s men in employment rising by just 258,000.

The employment rate for women aged 50-64 has increased by 3.3 percentage points over the period, compared to falls in all other working categories, the analysis showed.